FOREWORD: I was recently recruited to write for a relatively new website that I am delighted to recommend, called
WriterBeat. I can only guess that I came to its founder's attention because I have entrepreneurial tendencies, since she found me on LinkedIn. As I enjoy social media and I write well (according to some folks, anyway), the invitation was an easy one to accept. Anybody who knows me also knows how little I care for politics and/or politicians, which puts me in the minority at that site. Since my main interest is in freedom, politically motivated folks of any orientation - left, right or center - tend to find in me a dead end. For my part, I tend to find them almost uniformly frustrated and idealistic, which is a redundancy.
Anyway, as much as I enjoy the site - precisely because of the 'free-for-all' atmosphere and attitude of its founder - nevertheless I grow tired and bored of debate, which seems to be the great pasttime of the writers there. I chime in with relevant questions and comments, according to my iconoclastic nature, and yet I wish I could find a venue where intelligent people prefered investigation over verbal combat. Perhaps it is merely a sign of the times, tumultuous as they are ... but I doubt it. People are slow to change, like continental drift. Still, once in a while, there are gems to be found there, which is more than I can say of LinkedIn.
What follows is a transcription of one such gem.
If you have ever wondered what the essential difference between Communism and Capitalism is, without reference to Statism, then this exchange, below, is as good an introduction as any to these polar opposites. Out of respect for the participants (and love of humor), I have changed their names (and added photos), partly because I interact with some of them though mostly because you might, too, someday - at least if you follow my recommendation to visit the site. I have not changed the text except to add hyperlinks after the fact for your benefit - since there are many unfamiliar references worthy of further study - and remove a few words that might reveal the authors' identities.
As with
another entry in this blog, I am sorry and amused to report that the original thread was deleted, as you will see if you read this all the way through. I am equally happy to report that there were some who wanted to read it and couldn't, since now they can. You are, of course, free to draw whatever conclusions from it that you can or will, and as always I welcome challenging questions on this, or any, subject. Enjoy...
I recently read
David Graber's book,
The Democracy Project,
and he defines democracy as meaning direct democracy. That's obviously not the
way most people use the word. By claiming that the Civil Rights and Feminist
movements in the USA were successful, Graeber is able to claim that the Occupy
movement was also successful. I'd sure hate to see what failure looks like. Statist
is another interesting word. Just today I noticed that if you add
"ic" to statist, you get statistic. Not much of an insight, but it's
the only one I had today.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I don't know anything about David Graeber, nor would I read
any book entitled "
The Democracy Project", and yet he is 100% correct
about the success of both 1) the Feminist and 2) the Occupy
"movements". Nevertheless, I suspect that his reasons are wrong,
since neither had anything to do with what might be called "direct democracy".
Allow me to explain...
There are no grassroots movements, no
authentic ones anyway. What folks mistake for grassroots movements are born in think-tanks
and financed by smart, evil industrialists who know what their aim is and how
to achieve it by surreptitious means. To wit:
1) Feminism was conceived by the
Rockefellers and Carnegies, etc. in order to solve one very specific problem. As they saw it,
the tax base in the USA was not broad enough since only about half the
population was earning a wage, the men. The solution was to break up families.
By convincing women to seek "independence", they willingly became wage slaves.
It was a two-pronged attack, because there is always resistance to change. In
short, the ancillary benefit of this breaking up families was to get tthe children into
public schools earlier (since nobody was home to raise them), where they could
be raised by the state and be, let us say,
programmed that much easier. The
rest, of course, is history.
2) Occupy was also conceived in a think-tank (
OTPOR or an
offshoot/copycat thereof). From the point of view of its financiers, the goal
was/is to promote demand for martial law. Occupy was a dress rehearsal, you
might say. It also helped to establish a database of "potential
terrorists" who could later become "examples" - kinda the way
cops harass prostitutes. Those arrested were even forced to submit to biometric
scans in order to be released. As for the people on the street, you can see
from their cryptic hand signs, and especially the "human mic",
prima facie evidence of neurolinguistic programming on a massive scale. They were set
up to fail, which is evidence of the financiers' success.
I could go on, but you get the idea. From this counter-subversive point of
view, I'd like to see a lot more failure than success, regardless of
what David Graeber opines. Meanwhile, the lesson is to stay away
"movements" and collectivism in all its forms, as these are a mass suicide pact. Freedom does not
result from political action - the only results of political action are debt and death.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
David Graeber has a very interesting book entitled
Debt. If
you were a reader, I think you'd like it. The history of debt for the past
5,000 years is interesting.
The first wave of feminism in the US dates back to before
the Civil War. There were no think tanks then. Women were not allowed to own
property, and were legally considered property themselves--the property of
their fathers or husbands. There wasn't much of a tax base back then, and very
few schools, but women, being human, didn't want to be legally considered
property. Feminism isn't some recent idea of think tanks, it is a very old idea
and was the idea of women themselves. There's a book by
Dale Spender called,
Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, that traces the history of
feminism back much further, before the United States even existed.
Feminism is as old as, and was a natural reaction to
patriarchy, which was the subjugation of women. Patriachy and capitalism are
inextricably linked by the ownership of land, animals, women, children, and
slaves as property. The idea that some are better than others and are therefore
meant to dominate, rule, and exploit. It's a sickness, a disease, posing as
ideology.
Funny that those who oppose feminism didn't want to liberate
men from wage slavery so that they could reduce the tax base by staying home
and helping raise their kids. Why do you suppose that is?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
RE your final question, the answer is that there's no money
to be made by doing so.
As for the feminism of which you speak, it didn't get too
far, did it? (Otherwise it would not have reared its
ugly head two or three
more times in the 20th century.) Meanwhile, there absolutely were think tanks before
the civil war. Back then, they were called "Secret Societies" and
included, among others, the Masonic Lodge whose evil influence saturated the
"Founding Fathers". Names change - agendas don't.
Anyway, if there is one thing I'd have you grock about our
discussions so far, it's that they delight me immensely and I am truly grateful
for them, whether we agree or not on one point or another. I surely don't mean
to be adversarial, at least not toward you. If anything, I look forward to more
interaction and I come in peace.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
If it was just a question of making money, it wouldn't
matter whether it was a man or a woman who worked, as long as they earned
enough to support a familly. Advocating that women not work (that is, that they
only do unpaid work, like housework), while men get paid for their work, kept
women dependent upon men. And of course when women worked it was only with the
permission of their owners, their fathers or husbands, and their wages belonged
to their owners, not to the women. Even within my lifetime women weren't
allowed to buy a house without their father's or husband's signature. It was
all very cozy. Women were dependent upon men and men were dependent upon
capitalists, so you had chattel slaves (women), wage slaves (men), and actual
slaves (mostly black women and men). Nobody except the male capitalists was
free.
Yes, there were the secret societies, and there still are.
But feminists did make big gains. The
Suffragettes, who were misled into
campaigning for a worthless vote, had already gained literacy, something that
patriarchal societies had denied to women for thousands of years for fear that
if they were able to read religious texts, they'd learn of how they were
originally subjugated through violence. It turned out to be an unfounded fear,
as by the time women gained liteeracy, they had already identified with the
patriarchal gender role assigned to them at birth on the baiss of sex in
patriarchal societies, and mistook it for their basic identity, as do men.
As Dale Spender recounts at length in Women of Ideas,
patriarchal societies took great pains to suppress not only female progress,
but the knowledge of feminists who'd gone before them, so that each new
generation of feminists had to reinvent the wheel. But feminism wasn't and
coouldn't be stamped out because females, like males, get half their DNA from
each of their parents, so if the father is an alpha male and the mother a
submissive female, tthe daughters have as much chance of being alpha females as
of being submissives.
I enjoy our discussions too. But peace is also incompatible
with campitalism. When people are exploited, they will always, sooner or later,
resist.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I'd agree that the
Suffragettes were misled into campaigning
for a worthless vote, since voting is worthless (
or worse), but the rest of
what you've written ignores the fact that women have had done pretty well in
"patriarchal societies" worldwide and for millennia. It is a truism
that the men ruled in public and the women ruled at home. It is also true that
there has historically been more voluntary cooperation between the sexes than
there is now.
Anyway, I think you're missing the point, which is that
"popular movements" do not benefit their nominal beneficiaries. I'll
add that capitalism has nothing to do with exploiting people, since it is as
neutral as capital itself - I Beams and Pork Bellies, for example, don't
exploit people.
Capitalism in NOT a political system, after all. Politics is
all about exploiting people, that much is true, but capitalism is simply
commerce. Not all capitalists support the free market, which is a political
choice they make.
The great thing about the free market is that unless someone
produces that which others need and/or want, they don't survive - in
short, the free market responds to consumer demand and is the only system
that guarantees that consumers will not be and cannot be exploited. Once you
start exploiting people (empirically speaking, not you literally), then you're
no longer in a free market. It might be capitalist (such as fascism, for example)
but it surely ain't free, not even close.
Without freedom, there is no peace. Free people want to
produce and trade, not go to war and exploit people. If you think about it
without resorting to theories or propaganda, you will see the simple truth of
this. Free people don't benefit from exploiting each other; they prefer
peaceful, voluntary interaction with one another and self-ownership. Pretty
cool, eh?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Anarcho-capitalist is an oxymoron. Capitalism, the
privatization of the commons, the commodification and exploitation of labor and
natural resources, and the funneling of money and property from the many poor
to the few rich, is theft. Capitalism cannot exist without governments using
violence to protect stolen property and protect the thieves from their victims.
Capitalism really boils down to genocide and ecocide for profit. An anarchist
cannot be a capitalist. I'm an anarchist. You're a libertarian.
I read. A lot. That's how I learned what anarchism is and
that capitalism is incompatible with anarchism.
As for voluntarism, nobody sells or markets themself if they
really have a choice. Nobody exchanges their labor for less than its full value
if they really have a choice. Capitalism cannot exist unless some people have
no choice but to sell themselves and to exchange their labor for less than its
full value. Without that, capitalists cannot accumulate capital.
Have you ever read General Smedley Butler's "
War is a Racket"? There's a
video of it on YouTube if you google it. The way that
capitalists obtain raw materials and cheap labor is by having government
militaries go in and take them by force.
In other words, US taxpayers support a
military that operates on behalf of private rather than public interests.
Capitalists are racketeers and military troops are their enforcers and hitmen.
Sometimes the violence necessary to sustain capitalism isn't obvious, but it is
always there because capitalism can't exist without it.
Eventually you'll have to decide if you're an anarchist or a
capitalist, because you can't be both.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Meanwhile, taxation is theft, which is also a violation of
free trade. If it is not voluntary, then it is not free. Anarchism is simply a
society without rulers, which is not a barrier to free trade ... quite the
opposite.
The fundamental premise of anarcho-capitalism is that to
initiate force against others and/or to take others' property without consent
is immoral, and that government is a license to do exactly that. For all the
evils of Statism and for all the supposed services it provides (which you have
correctly noted are funded by theft and murder), there is a free market
alternative that does not require a monopoly on the use of force nor coercion of
any kind.
Although there are varieties of capitalism (such as the
crony capitalism, or "crapitalism" that you describe), capital is
simply capital. It is not a political system per se, nor incompatible with freedom and/or voluntarism.
In fact, there are thousands, literally thousands, of
self-identified anarcho-capitalists. Although it is a comparatively small
group, it is possibly the fastest growing, and not just in the USA.
Incidentally, a little know fact is that the reason why the
Libertarian Party can't seem to grow is that most of its members defect to the
"ancap" philosophy. A funny but true riddle asks:
Q: What is the difference between a minarchist and an
anarchist?
A: About six months.
Since you like YouTube and I don't like reading (which I can
do in six languages, I simply like to hear people express their ideas
better than listening to my own silent voice in my head), allow me to recommend
a brief animated explanation of "
What Anarchy Isn't" by Larken Rose.
I'd be delighted to read your feedback.
By the way, I am NOT a Libertarian - those bozos
are ingenuous and self-deluding Statists.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Free trade would be an equal exchange of goods and labor,
Nabokov. With an equal exchange of goods and labor, there could be no capital
accumulation. Capitalism cannot exist without capital, so without an imposed
system (nobody would voluntarily exchange their goods and labor for less than
their full worth), there could be no accumulation of capital and thus no
capitalism. Capitalism doesn't mean whatever libertarians say it means, it
means what it says--like any other ism, remove the "ism" suffix and
what you have left is what that "ism" believes in. Capitalists believe
in capital.
I'm not going to read what anarchism isn't, because I have
bookcases full of anarchist literature, so I already know what anarchism
actually is. I'm not saying that there aren't people who call themselves
anarcho-capitalists, because there are. Just that they are deluded about the
nature of anarchism and of capitalism, both. We even had one in my city who ran
for Mayor, something that is compatible with capitalism, but not at all
compatible with anarchism. If you don't believe in government, you don't ask
people to vote for you so that you can become part of government.
In the parts of Spain that were anarchist for a short while
before
Franco, everyone had to do their own work because nobody would work for
wages, and there was no money, only equal exchanges of goods and labor.
Anarchism is essentially anti-capitalist. An anarcho-capitalist is a person who
doesn't know that they're a libertarian because they don't have sufficient
knowledge of either anarchism or capitalism.
I don't like YouTube. I prefer books. I don't want someone's
interpretation of what somebody else said, I want the original source material.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I don't want someone else's interpretation either, which is
why I like to see and hear people speak for themselves ... their own ideas.
Me reading is just somebody's interpretation ... mine. That's why I prefer
video over literature, when possible ... because IT IS the original
source material.
Anyways, my question for you is this: if you are anti free
trade, then how do you rationalize calling yourself an anarchist? I ask because
the anarchists I know are all pro-freedom and yet you seem not to be.
Besides that, I never ran for Mayor and I don't vote. I'd
never run for any elected office. Are you saying that someone self-styled
anarchist ran for Mayor somewhere? If so, then s/he was simply a liar and
therefore irrelevant. As for libertarians, they're statists and anarchists are
not.
I just don't get why you assume that people cannot trade
profitably and voluntarily in the absence of government when, in fact, they can
and do. Would you care to enlighten me on how you got there?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Hi Joe, Just a quick thought: the fruits of a tree are
not provided free to anyone. As I'm sure you know, the tree is doing what it's
doing for it's own gain.
Nothing is free, from what I have seen of the world.
There's give and take, balance. If not in the moment, eventually. The rent
always comes due, no such thing as a free lunch, all that. True stuff. Which is
why I also tend to support a truly free market. Voluntary exchange between
folks is a beautiful, mutually beneficial thing.
And to comment on the rest of it: It seems that profit, or
at least accumulation of wealth, can certainly happen in a voluntary way. I
mean, look at a simple community farmer's market.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Natasha, a tree in the wild makes no monetary gain. It is
doing what it does because it is a tree, not because it can exploit others or
make money. If your ancestors hadn't been conquered and domesticated, when you
were hungry you could just go out and pluck some fruit from a tree and eat it,
without having to first get a job and earn money to pay for it. People who
haven't been conquered amd domesticated do not have to pay rent. A simple
community farmers market is much better than a chain supermarket, but it is not
a voluntary exchange. A voluntary exchange would be between two people
exchanging things of equal value without landlords or government issued money
extracting value from that exchange for the profit of banksters. My very first
job, more than 55 years ago, was in a bank, and I noticed that not a penny went
through the bank without the bank taking a portion of it. The accumulation of
wealth at the expense of others is not voluntary for those who have no other
possible way to survive than to work for minimum wage so that an employer can
profit by exploiting their labor.
I just deleted a comment by another capitalist who I had
warned. The comment was off-topic, disruptive, and just name-calling. I'm now
warning you. Your next comment, if it doesn't respond directly to anything in
my original article, will be deleted for being off topic.
It is theft to hijack a topic about not voting and use it to
proselytize for capitalism, voluntaryism, libertarianism, or an oxymornic term
like "anarcho-capitalism." I don't know how much you were paid to try
to hijack this topic, but since you would only be doing it for profit, because
you believe that everything is done for gain, that's all you're getting. Get
lost.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Nabokov, I first heard your joke a couple of years ago when
I was debating a leading Libertarian on the radio. He told it after I'd made a
point he couldn't refute, as if to say that he admitted I was right but he just
wasn't there yet.
I have books by and about anarchists like Kropotkin, Bakunin,
Proudhon, Malatesta, Magon, Durruti, McHarg, Graeber, Zibechi, and many many
more. I have books by anarchist publishers like AK Press, PM Press, and Little
Black Cart, and I also have anarchist books published by university presses. I
keep up with the current selection(s) of the Anarchist & Radical book club
on Goodreads, and from time to time I post to an anarchist website that doesn't
allow "anarcho-capitalists" because it is a contradiction in terms.
You're asking me to distill things that took me years to learn into a few
words, which is impossible, but I'll try anyway.
Anarchists believe that properety is theft. Capitalists,
like libertarians, don't believe that property is theft.
In nature there are trees, people, animals, birds, and
insects. In nature the fruits of a tree provides free food for people, animals,
birds, and insects. When somebody declares a tree to be their private property,
that they own the tree and that nobody can eat from that tree without paying
them, it is an act of hubris and of theft. In order to have that tree as their
private property when others need food, they need a system of government to
protect their right to own property that should, by nature, belong to all. They
want to be able to call the cops or the army if hungry people try to take the
fruit from "their" tree. Libertarians want government to protect
their private property, they just don't want to pay taxes for that protection.
Food Not Bombs are anarchists who take food that they've grown, or that was donated
or thrown away, and use it to feed people for free. They don't want to own the
food or profit from the food, they think everyone has the right to eat. It was
only during my lifetime that water, which was once considered something
everyone had a right to, became polluted and privatized so that people had to
buy water. City air is so heavily polluted that people whose health requires
clean air have to pay for oxygen. What was once the commons, has now become
private property, but it was stolen. Stolen from the commons. Stolen from
everyone to become the property of the few.
Capitalists and libertarians believe that a person has the
right to own as much property as they can obtain and want, and that government
should protect that right, so that the excess property of the rich is protected
from the needy from whom they or their ancestors originally stole it.
Anarchists believe that we are part of nature and that nature belongs to
nature, including people, animals, birtds, insects, and trees, not just to
people. Nature is a balanced ecological system. Trees provide food, leaves,
wood, and other useful things that people, animals, birds, and insects can use,
and in turn, the beneficiaries pollinate and provide fertilizer for the trees.
The exchange does not provide excess profit to any part of nature or deprive
any part of nature of its share. That is a free exchange.
I once had a libertarian on Twitter tell me that everything
and everyone is property, that he is property, and that the reason he is free
is because he owns himself. To me, the idea of human property is abhorrent and
even in the US it is technically illegal to own human property. Where that
leads is to people saying that they demand that others respect their freedom to
choose to be slaves. I think that all forms of slavery should be abolished and
that people should be free. I don't think that anyone should have the right to
choose to be a slave because they are therefore also claiming the right of
people to own slaves.
I already tried to explain to you about free trade. For
there to be genuine free trade, there must be no systemic coercion that causes
people to need to exchange their goods or labor for less than their full value
and allow others to profit thereby, and no system of protection for those who
steal any part of the value of other people's goods or labor. Free trade today
means that there are sweatshops where people work 12 hours a day in horrificly
unsafe and inhuman conditions so that factory owners, contractors, and brand
names can profit from their labor, selling a shirt or pair of sneakers that
cost a dollar in raw materials and a few cents in labor, for hundreds of
dollars in profit. There's nothing free about such an unequal exchange, as
we've often seen in Bangladesh when owners refused to allow sweatshop workers
to leave when buildings caught on fire and thousands died. Libertarian
capitalists don't want government laws to protect such workers because it
interferes with the rights of profiteers to profit.
You either trade freely, which if everyone was free, would
mean that nobody got less than the full value of their labor, or you have
capitalism where employers are entitled to profit by taking a share of the
value of labor for themselves, forcing workers to exchange their labor for less
than it is really worth. People can and do trade voluntarily in the absence of
government, but not profitably, because if they were to profit at the expense
of others without government to protect their right to do so, those being
exploited would rebel. That often happens, and in this country there have been
many times that the capitalists called out federal troops to kill workers who
were striking for the right to be just a bit less exploited. People don't like
to be exploited and if you are profiting from the labor of others, you are
exploiting them, so you need government to protect you from them when they
resist being exploited.
In nature there is no private property or personal profit. A
tree doesn't sell tickets to eat its fruit. People, animals, birds, and insects
don't have to buy tickets to eat fruit.
In anarchist communities, the land belongs to the community,
not to landlords. The community makes communal decisions as to how to
distribute and use the land so as to best supply the needs of the community without
exploiting anyone. In primitive societies this has worked for tens of thousands
of years, and in some places, despite constant attacks by corporations and
governments, it still does.
Bring in profits, and some prosper while others starve.
Libertarian capitalists want people to have the right to choose to profit, even
if that means that others then have no choice but to starve, but anarchists
believe that property is theft and that nobody should profit at the expense of
anyone else.
You're not going to do your homework on capitalism and
anarchism as I have. One of my definitions of a statist is someone who pays
somebody else to do their homework for them and therefore never learns
anything. Statists believe in government. They elect people to make their
decisions for them, they elect people to rule them, and they elect people to
tax them. Libertarian capitalists want to exploit others, and to be able to
call on government to protect them if the exploited rebel, but they don't want
to pay taxes for that service. Their freedom is the freedom to exploit others,
something that no anarchist would call freedom.
When a video mentions Lysander Spooner or a book talks about
anarchism, that is not the original source. The original source is the writing
of Spooner himself and the writing of the anarchists cited. Interpretations of
those writings are not the original source. The only way you can know what
somebody actually thought and wrote is if you read their writings. If somebody
else tells you that they read those writings, and gives you their
interpretation, it is not the original source, it is their interpretation. If
thaty person has an ideology, like capitalism or libertarianism, their
interpretation of anarchist writings is not likely to be accurate and is very
apt to be slanted to fit their ideology.
Let me explain what an original source is. If somebody here
tells me what you said in one of your articles, the only way I can be certain
that's what you really said is to go to the article and read it myself. Otherwise,
I'm not going to the original source, but just taking somebody else's word for
what they claim you said. Their interpretation of what you wrote might or might
not be accurate, but either way, the original source is what you wrote, not
what somebody said you wrote. If nothing else, I hope I was able to explain
that simply enough for you to understand it. That would be a big step toward
your ability to understand other things.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
That is a high word count for so little original or even new
content. More importantly, much of it is just not true. I'll confine myself to
one point in particular.
You write, in essence, "anarchists believe this;
anarchists believe that; anarchists believe this; anarchists believe that
..."
In order to verify this, you'd have to ask every individual
anarchist. And since many of them have conflicting beliefs, your proclamations will
be wrong at least as often as they are right.
You can make sweeping generalizations about statists, but
not about anarchists.
Anyway, I don't watch videos about people; I watch
videos by people. With all due respect (and I mean that sincerely), I
don't give a shit about the history of anarchism - it's the future that
interests me.
Thus, I study those works produced by living anarchists,
many of whom upload videos since that's where the audiences are these days.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
So in order to know what Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, etc.,
believe, you'd have to ask each indivbidual Catholic, Jew, or Buddhist? You
couldn't just read the books that form the basis of those systems of belief?
An "anarchist" book or video produced by a
libertarian or a capitalist is not a way to find out what anarchists believe,
it is a way to find out what libertarians and capitalists think of anarchism.
In most primitive societies, the spears are formed for
hunting and the spoils of the hunt are shared with the entire community,
including the young and the old who cannot hunt.
Anarchism doesn't mean without rules, it means without
rulers. And the rules are no capitalism, no exploitation, no slavery in any
form, and no privatization of nature. Even Creationists admit that the land was
here before people were, so people belong to the land, not land to the people.
Apparently I was not able to explain the meaning of
"original source" clearly enough for you to understand it, as you
continue to cite secondary sources. If you can't distinguish between an
original source and a secondary source, it is a waste of my time to try to discuss
anything with you. I tried, I did my best, but as it turns out you are
disrupting this topic with your proselytizing for anarcho-capitalism, which is
actually anti-anarchism like all forms of capitalism, and I'm not going to
allow you to continue.
You can't have both private property and freedom. If the
bounties of the natural habitat that sustained life freely for tens of
thousands of years are privatized, those who don't own property perish because
there is no longer a commons to enable them to survive. Property, not instinct
or nature, is the origin or war.
Where everything is shared freely by everyone,
there is no conflict.
Fuck off, Nabokov. This topic is about delegitimizing
government, not about property rights. Go sell your capitalism someplace else.
I'll delete any further comments from you about so-called
"anarcho-capitalism." All you do when you say that you're not doing
what you're obviously doing, is proving that you don't know what you're doing.
Do it in your own articles, not here.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I was wondering how long it would take for you guys to find
each other:) I'm loving this exchange so far. Nabokov, now you see what I meant
when I said anarchists are hard to define. You don't even agree on the basic
premise on what constitutes aggression/theft.
Political labels are imprecise at
best and misleading at worst, but people do have some kind of constant desire
to use and claim them.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Yeah, tell me about it. So far, as best I can tell, some
anarchists are pro-freedom and others are, well, kinda cultish. I'm not saying
that cults are intrinsically bad, mind you. They vary about as much as
political theories do. For instance, the Amish peoples comprise a cult, and so
does the so-called Illuminati. The differences are enormous.
Anyways, in my humble opinion, Joe has an impractical and
unhealthy interest in theory. Any Indian who's ever fashioned a stick into a
spear understands property rights. It takes some pretty sophisticated language
in order to misunderstand the basics.
However, some folks arrive at anarchism via reactionary
disgust against the State (which is understandable) rather than from first
principles. What I find so odd (and do not share) is Joe's obstinate
insistence, which, among things, smacks of collectivism.
Respecting self-ownership as I do, I cannot bring myself to
speak for others. Instead, I rely on the Socratic Method.
The funny thing I run into is that folks are so threatened
by questions and almost never think to ask any of their own. As a case in point,
folks
here essentially write like:
"This. Oh, and that, too. Next, this. And this. Which
means that. And of course, this. Therefore, this, this and that."
I find that, well, pushy and, more importantly, boring. I
strive to write with pull instead, which is less predictable and thus less
boring, too. It also leads to more discoveries. For example:
"We've probably all seen this. But what if that? Or
that? Where might that lead? And if this, does it also mean that? If not, then
why not? And instead of what, or even why, shouldn't we be asking how?"
Alas, though, my hope is partially realized by your
comment(s), here and elsewhere. Sometimes the writers here accuse me of -
whatever - because I don't agree with them, and then they want me to go away.
Me, I write for the benefit of the third-person readers, the witnesses, since there are more of them than there are of me and Joe ... right now, that's you, Selovanova. So I humbly thank you for chiming in regardless of your
own subjective leanings, whatever they may be, since I now know that there is,
in fact, at least one third person.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Anarchism is not political. Anarchists do not seek power the
way that all political parties do.
Capitalists want to claim and own everything, not
anarchists. But for capitalists to try to claim anarchism is disgusting. Once
there is a right to own land as private property, there will be the right to
own everything on that land, including trees, plants, rivers, lakes, animals,
birds, insects, and even people as private property, and property does not have
the right to life as it can be killed in what capitalists see as the necessary
protection of "their" property--never mind that they never created
anything and merely stole what was already here.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Capitalists ain't political either. And being an anarchist,
let me tell you that I don't want to claim and own everything. With all due
respect, Joe, you oughtta lighten up. Seriously, by what right to you claim to
speak for me? The anarchists I know tend to reject authority ... but not you.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Without theory, Nabokov, you are just a capitalist with a
stick, a spear, an assault rifle, or a bomb, acquiring property through
violence.
Since you are not interested in this topic and only
interested in your own topics, please get the fuck out of here before I have to
start deleting your comments to keep this section on topic.
Yes, I want you to go away. Not because you're writing for
third parties, but because you are proselytizing for something off-topic, your
so-called "anarcho-capitalism," which is a form of capitalism and is
antithetical to anarchism. Third parties interested in promoting private property
can learn about it in your own topics, not here.
If you found this topic boring, you'd never have posted
here. Instead you found it threatening enough that you have tried to disrupt it
with your proselytizing for capitalist property rights.
Your comments are shallow, meaningless, off topic, and
disruptive. You have no concept of theory and no ability to reason. I(f some
anarchists are a cult, then your so-called anarcho-capitalists would be a
sub-cult. I explained things in my own words and you just ignored my
explanations because you prefer secondary sources. Get the fuck out of here and
take Selovanova with you, if you can.
If you want to comment on anything in the original topic
here, or try to refute a single point, go right ahead. If all you want to do is
talk about libertarians posing as anarchists, do it in your own articles.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Geez, Joe, all I'm trying to do is to put government (any government, anywhere) out of business. I must say, you're unreasonably militant ... and militantly unreasonable.
I wonder why you don't just call yourself a communist, but not badly enough to start another thread with you. Me, I like prosperity as long as it harms nobody else and doesn't violate anybody's freedom. You people seem to enjoy privation and misery, which is cool for you but I want no part of it.
So go and do whatever it is you do. I came in peace and I go in peace. до свидания товарища...
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